I rolled out of bed on just four hours sleep this morning, and felt amazingly refreshed. I don’t know why, but I always seem to do better with less sleep. I’m more alert, and my mood is much lighter when I get less than the recommended 6 – 8 hours.

I arrived at Happy’s early enough before my shift to be able to smoke a cigarette without feeling guilty. One of my biggest pet peeves is not being able to smoke before work. The other one is being late. So that means I have to arrive at work with at least 10 minutes before my shift starts so that I can smoke. After finishing my cigarette I went inside, trying to squeeze by the mass of people milling around the podium without bumping into too many of them. I put my sweater in my locker, washed my hands and was ready to hop on the floor.

It turned out though, that my whole section had filled up during the 5 minutes I took to smoke . Wonderful. Now I would have to wait anywhere between 20-45 minutes to even get my first table. To keep myself busy, I rolled silverware setups and ran food out to other tables, trying to help the servers who were clearly overwhelmed.

Twenty minutes later everyone clears out of my section at once. I am quick to help the hotess, Kara, bus my tables so we can fill up my section, which consists of 5 tables. As soon as Kara seats my first table, I head over to get there drink order. Out of the corner of my eye I can see her seating my other four tables in rapid succession. This is something that would stress out many of the other servers that I work with, but it is something I look forward to. When all the parties come in at the same time I just grab all the drink orders put them on a huge tray and bring them out. I then loop back to the first table to get their food order and so on. All the food comes out at relatively the same time which means while I am waiting for the food I have a bunch of free time on my hands to roll silverware, stock the service aisle, or even sneak out for the occasional cigarette. After they are done eating food I grab icecream orders from all five tables, scoop them, and drop them off with the corresponding checks. After the customers eat the icecream and leave, the cycle begins again.

It was especially busy today, with the weather being so nice and I tried to take advantage of this my turning my tables over as fast as possible. The one thing holding me back, though, was the grill cooks. There is one guy, Mason, who transferred from a different Happy’s, that pushes food out at a snail’s pace. He blatantly tells anyone who will listen that he could care less how long the food will take to come out, doesn’t care if it affect’s the waitress tips, and doesn’t care if the customer’s call the corporate office to complain. The other cook, Jason, genuinely does try his best, but he just isn’t all that coordinated when it comes to cooking. Needless to say, the two of them in the grill together are somewhat of a disaster.

For an eight hour shift, they day went buy surprisingly fast. My sales were $800, and I ended up making $170 in tips, which is a little bit better than 20%. Not a bad day at all.